That by his act the Germans in their speeding sky-craft were baffled there is no doubt. They had lost their trail of fire; their involuntary guide had disappeared in the gloom. The airmen's long journey had suddenly become fruitless; their peril from hidden British guns and flying scouts was increased tenfold. The heat of the night was as nothing to the hot surge of disappointment that must have swept the brains of the Zeppelin crew. Their commander, too, must have lost his judgment utterly, forgotten his sense of military effectiveness. Whatever happened, he sacrificed his soul when he turned his cloud-ship aside from the railway line, steered over the shabby roofs of Walthamstow and, at less than two thousand feet, unloosed his iron dogs of destruction. [Sidenote: Bombing tenements of a defenseless town.] I have it on the authority of experienced aviators that it is not impossible on a dark night to distinguish buildings of importance like St. Paul's or the Houses of Parliament or a great gun factory or a river as broad as the Thames with its uprearing and frequent bridges. The crowding tenements of Walthamstow could have had no semblance to any of these, at any height. It would seem a cheap and worthless revenge, then, to wreck an unimportant and defenceless town, having failed to wreck the military nerve-center of the world's metropolis. But this is what one of Count Zeppelin's soaring dreadnoughts did in this night, in this blood-drenched year. [Sidenote: When a bomb explodes.] Like the mirage of a tropical island the dirigible hung motionless in space for a breathless minute. There was a wavering pin-prick of light in the carriage suspended from the leviathan's belly--a light that fluttered fore and aft as of a man with a fairy lantern running to and fro giving orders or taking them. Then faintly discernible against the sky, like a rope hung down for anchorage, came a thin, gray streak--the tail of a bomb with all hell in its wake. From somewhere near the town's centre the earth split and roared apart. The world reeled and a brain-shattering crash compounded of all the elements of pain and hurled from the shoulders of a thousand thunderclaps smote the senses. It was a blast of sickening and malignant fury. It did not so much stun as it stopped one--stopped the breath and the heart's beat, suspending thought, halting life itself for a fraction of time. One was, somehow, aware of existence but without sensation. And then came reaction and the realization of what was really taking place. The German's bomb landed fully ten blocks away, but you would have taken oath in court that it had fallen at your feet, behind you, above you and into your very brain. [Sidenote: Terror of the people.] [Sidenote: A broken gas main.]